I enjoyed the post! However, I'm not sure your argument that "At best, feminists speak for a bare majority of American women" is especially relevant to efforts to make EA specifically more inclusive to women. In the US at least, support for feminism is very strongly associated with politics and education - the Pew poll you linked shows that 42% of Republican-leaning women would say feminist describes them somewhat or very well, vs. 75% of Democratic-leaning women. For educational attainment, it's 54% for women who did not attend college vs. 72% for women who did. (The Ipsos poll with the stronger criteria shows similar trends - 48% of democratic women identify as feminists, vs 13% of republican women). Polling on college campuses seems to show an even stronger trend, the one poll I could quickly find showed 78% of women in college identifying as feminists https://web.archive.org/web/20151124015741/https://www.hercampus.com/life/hcs-feminism-campus-survey-2015#feminism
We know from the EA survey (https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/wtQ3XCL35uxjXpwjE/ea-survey-2019-series-community-demographics-and) that engaged EAs are extraordinarily biased towards being young, left-leaning and college educated, with >90% of EAs either having a college degree or being in the process of obtaining one and 72% identifying as politically left of center vs. 3.5% identifying as right of center. Given those demographics, I think there's a strong case to be made that more like 3/4ths of women who might currently be potential EAs in the US are likely to be feminists.
Now I think there's a separate question of whether EA could try and be more appealing to conservatives and people without college degrees. But if one is interested in making EA more inclusive to women in the near future, I those general demographic trends are likely to be relevant
As an introverted autist with a severe psychometrics addiction, one thing I've been thinking about recently is what opportunities I could have to apply my survey skills to better understand social relations, particularly among people who are minorities among the demographics I interact with.
As such, I have considered doing surveys to better understand women's concerns and needs, and the application of making EA/rationalist spaces more inclusive to women seems like an interesting place to investigate.
My immediate thought would be applying my currently-favorite set of methods. That is:
1. Make a qualitative survey among EA/rationalist women where I ask them to describe what they would like from the spaces and/or what challenges they face (encouraging them to mention both challenges that are obviously woman-specific and challenges that are more personal but which might turn out to be relevant for the research). I might also recruit non-EA/non-rationalist women for comparison, or filter non-EA/non-rationalist women who feel they would have an interest in rationalist/EA topics, and ask them for qualitative data, to better cover "potential members" and not just preexisting members (your Bell Curves Problem).
2. Based on that qualitative survey, create questions that assess the concerns the women bring up, and turn that into a quantitative/multiple-choice survey, to better characterize the distribution of women there are with the different concerns. Distribute that survey to EA/rationalist women, and again, maybe also some non-EA/non-rationalist women to have some comparison.
3. Do various types of analysis to characterize what sorts of concerns are common and how they might trade off against other concerns, characterizing the different women's perspectives.
Whenever I consider making these sorts of surveys, I always end up wondering to what extent my curiosity about the results is due to being a male-brained autistic introvert, that is, someone who doesn't interact much with people (introvert), is bad at understanding people (autistic), and in particular doesn't interact much with the demographic in question (male-brained), and therefore fails to see the obvious big picture that anyone involved in the subject would see. It does seem like something that _should_ be common knowledge. But it might be that most others might also be unsure about these sorts of questions? In which case, perhaps the survey would be worthwhile.
Even if the survey results will be obvious to most people, I might try to do it anyway to learn it for myself. But I would be curious to know if this is something anyone else would want to see, as it could help inform me whether it's worth making this survey (and similar surveys more generally).
"For the love of God, do something about that thing where any conventionally attractive woman in a male-dominated space gets swarmed by six men hanging on her every word and conspicuously not hitting on her."
Uh-oh. Why do I suddenly hear the chorus to Taylor Swift's "Anti-Hero" in my head?
Anyway, having been the kind of person who would be on the male side of that kind of interaction, I can certainly imagine why it could become a problem even if every individual man is on his best behavior, but I don't know how to change the incentives so that "there are many lonely men that want the attention of one of a much smaller number of conventionally attractive women" doesn't turn into "any conventionally attractive woman who shows up becomes the object of more attention than she's comfortable dealing with".
I enjoyed the post! However, I'm not sure your argument that "At best, feminists speak for a bare majority of American women" is especially relevant to efforts to make EA specifically more inclusive to women. In the US at least, support for feminism is very strongly associated with politics and education - the Pew poll you linked shows that 42% of Republican-leaning women would say feminist describes them somewhat or very well, vs. 75% of Democratic-leaning women. For educational attainment, it's 54% for women who did not attend college vs. 72% for women who did. (The Ipsos poll with the stronger criteria shows similar trends - 48% of democratic women identify as feminists, vs 13% of republican women). Polling on college campuses seems to show an even stronger trend, the one poll I could quickly find showed 78% of women in college identifying as feminists https://web.archive.org/web/20151124015741/https://www.hercampus.com/life/hcs-feminism-campus-survey-2015#feminism
We know from the EA survey (https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/wtQ3XCL35uxjXpwjE/ea-survey-2019-series-community-demographics-and) that engaged EAs are extraordinarily biased towards being young, left-leaning and college educated, with >90% of EAs either having a college degree or being in the process of obtaining one and 72% identifying as politically left of center vs. 3.5% identifying as right of center. Given those demographics, I think there's a strong case to be made that more like 3/4ths of women who might currently be potential EAs in the US are likely to be feminists.
Now I think there's a separate question of whether EA could try and be more appealing to conservatives and people without college degrees. But if one is interested in making EA more inclusive to women in the near future, I those general demographic trends are likely to be relevant
Thank you so much for posting this. It's a concise writeup of some points that badly need to be made.
As an introverted autist with a severe psychometrics addiction, one thing I've been thinking about recently is what opportunities I could have to apply my survey skills to better understand social relations, particularly among people who are minorities among the demographics I interact with.
As such, I have considered doing surveys to better understand women's concerns and needs, and the application of making EA/rationalist spaces more inclusive to women seems like an interesting place to investigate.
My immediate thought would be applying my currently-favorite set of methods. That is:
1. Make a qualitative survey among EA/rationalist women where I ask them to describe what they would like from the spaces and/or what challenges they face (encouraging them to mention both challenges that are obviously woman-specific and challenges that are more personal but which might turn out to be relevant for the research). I might also recruit non-EA/non-rationalist women for comparison, or filter non-EA/non-rationalist women who feel they would have an interest in rationalist/EA topics, and ask them for qualitative data, to better cover "potential members" and not just preexisting members (your Bell Curves Problem).
2. Based on that qualitative survey, create questions that assess the concerns the women bring up, and turn that into a quantitative/multiple-choice survey, to better characterize the distribution of women there are with the different concerns. Distribute that survey to EA/rationalist women, and again, maybe also some non-EA/non-rationalist women to have some comparison.
3. Do various types of analysis to characterize what sorts of concerns are common and how they might trade off against other concerns, characterizing the different women's perspectives.
Whenever I consider making these sorts of surveys, I always end up wondering to what extent my curiosity about the results is due to being a male-brained autistic introvert, that is, someone who doesn't interact much with people (introvert), is bad at understanding people (autistic), and in particular doesn't interact much with the demographic in question (male-brained), and therefore fails to see the obvious big picture that anyone involved in the subject would see. It does seem like something that _should_ be common knowledge. But it might be that most others might also be unsure about these sorts of questions? In which case, perhaps the survey would be worthwhile.
Even if the survey results will be obvious to most people, I might try to do it anyway to learn it for myself. But I would be curious to know if this is something anyone else would want to see, as it could help inform me whether it's worth making this survey (and similar surveys more generally).
"For the love of God, do something about that thing where any conventionally attractive woman in a male-dominated space gets swarmed by six men hanging on her every word and conspicuously not hitting on her."
Uh-oh. Why do I suddenly hear the chorus to Taylor Swift's "Anti-Hero" in my head?
Anyway, having been the kind of person who would be on the male side of that kind of interaction, I can certainly imagine why it could become a problem even if every individual man is on his best behavior, but I don't know how to change the incentives so that "there are many lonely men that want the attention of one of a much smaller number of conventionally attractive women" doesn't turn into "any conventionally attractive woman who shows up becomes the object of more attention than she's comfortable dealing with".
> At best, feminist speak for a bare majority of American women.
Typo, should be "feminists".